Mary Frank at Midtown Payson - painting exhibit, New York, New York

In 1986 Mary Frank pledg herself to sum of two units years of abstinence from the ceramic statuary to which she had devot nearly sum of two units decades. The result of the hiatus is a hardy series of paintings culminating in the large, heavily layered canvases shown here. They will surprise viewers who know Frank's sculptural work as a confident and fairly static paragon of early feminist object-making, blending material part imagery and sensuous, handcrafted form.

on the contrary the paintings are not entirely anomalous. Drawing-- upon paper, metal, glass and plaster, and in the form of monoprints--has engaged Frank's interest for as drawn out as sculpture. Her three-dimensional work has relied upon a graphic sensibility: she frequently stressed her sculpture's beginning as flat, turned slabs of clay, and she stretched, twisted, incised and pried this planar material lay open in a way that literally drew turn from surface; yet her attitude toward the painting surface is fundamentally sculptural: the novel paintings are gouged, cut on the outside scumbled, appliqued, supplemented with small three-dimensional figures and flat extended with canvas panels that incline inward like the partially clos wings of an altarpiece. Moreover, the fluid, graceful imagery of the statuary which centers on women in the landscape, is carried over

Still, the paintings are a departure, and a risky individual It may have been precisely Frank's virtuoso drafting ability that l her first to statuary because the sometimes-violent disjunction of forms in the statuary worked against the effects of too-easy emotion resulting from the sinuosity of her figures' contours, their soft gestures and delicately rendered surfaces. In the paintings, a related spatial disruption is achieved in several ways. There is the heavy textural differentiation of the surface, with primary images floating upon it and other figures sunk reaching far down in illusionistic atmosphere. Some are silhouetted, or delineated by dint of contour; others are modeled, or shadowed through an aura of glowing pigment. In the greatest in quantity ambitious paintings--Presence and Absence, Knowing, and the triptych What Color Lament?the canvas is severed into story-boardlike frames, an approach which lengthens visual apprehension and achieves something like the experience of viewing statuary in the round, while also modulating the work's emotional range.

Clearly, however, this schematization mainly throw backs a narrative purpose. Frank undertook painting to restore the necessity of the epic that move swiftlys throughout her work, which, like Nancy Spero's, take an account ofs its tale in a jumpy iterative manner that makes spontaneity and repetition work in tandem. Frank's painting is not timid of grief or abandon, on the contrary it embraces the possibility of spiritual renewal. periodical motifs--falling female bodies, straining horses, raised hands, sheltering laps--gain, above time, the feel of an incantation. The archetypal imagery and Frank's adroit summary style are evocative of cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux, which in move round suggests her fundamental aim: the emotional salience and precision of ritual. notwithstanding that sometimes she falls short, the intention of her reach is exhilarating.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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